Christina and the Butterflies, Carleton University Butterfly Show
I don’t normally comment on people in my postings but today I met a special individual completely at ease with butterflies and they with her. In previous posts, I have commented on Chickadees landing on my hands for a seed or two A bird in the hand, but today was something different. Today, I watched in the Carleton University greenhouses as butterfly after butterfly would hover around Christina and perch upon her clothing and even on her nose. Butterflies that would be somewhat skittish around anyone else, would land on her and rest for significant periods of time without flinching even though cameras and flashes were within inches. She tells me that she has had the same effect/experience with the Carleton University Butterfly Show butterflies in the past. Must be something about her calm demeanor but for me, who spends quite a bit of time photographing butterflies and damselflies, today was something else. Fun to watch someone so at ease with the creatures around her.
She tells me that the white ones don’t tickle as much!
The first few days, the Nikon bodies outnumbered the Canon bodies (I’m biased) but today the Canon folks came to the party :-).
As another busload of anklebiters arrived, even the Canon folks found the going a bit tougher. Meanwhile, my carefully trained attack butterfly was beginning to flex its wings !!!
TECH:
About the lens: The lens that I used for today’s shots is a Nippon Kogaku Micro-Nikkor 55mm f3.5 lens manufactured in the mid 1960’s. ( photos of lens). It is a manual focus lens but very easy to focus with the big focusing ring. The scalloped focusing ring is an interesting feature which was replaced by a diamond hatched lower profile focusing ring in later models. I purchased the lens used. Although not really common, various iterations of this lens come up for sale on ebay quite often and are totally compatible with the pro and prosumer lines of Nikon DSLRs. It is my understanding, however, that it is not totally compatible with some of Nikon’s consumer level DSLRs. I’ve only used it on my Nikon D200 and D300 and it works fine on those bodies.
More of my butterfly blogs:
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 1
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 2
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 3
Carleton Butterfly Show – Day 5
Carleton Butterfly Show – weekend crowd
Great series….so far! Looking forward to your continuing day-to-day adventure.
Some fabulous shots of those “Canon” guys….lol
Was a pleasure chatting with you today!
Best Regards;
Thanks Ted. Slowly working my way into the excitement of two weeks on safari in Kenya and Tanzania at the end of the month. I’ll encourage my son to capture the big creatures and I’ll continue to focus on the little creatures (with a lion or two thrown in for good measure).
Thanks for the photos! It was really nice meeting you, and you’ve got some AWESOME photos here! 🙂 Cheers!
Thanks back to you as well.
Hi Ron,
Christina is a friend! She posted the link to your site on her facebook wall. Awesome photos of the butterfly on Christina’s nose & of the other butterflies! I’m hoping to get to the display at Carleton U this week!
Thanks Daniel. Glad you liked them. I was there again today. Will post those shots later tonight. Now have five blog entries relating to five days of the butterflies. Each day has been fun and different. Might even get back again :-).
Most excellent! Have you seen the Ottawa Citizen video of Christina? She’s become quite the media “darling!” I’m really looking forward to the show!
Christina will need to carry a pen with her from now on to sign all of all those autographs. I tried doing a Google search on “Christina butterflies” this morning and Christina (of Carleton butterfly fame) is now only an entry or two below Christina Aguilera. By the time that Google finds the Citizen video and a few more people click on my blog entry, Aguilera might have to be satisfied with second billing on that search entry LOL.
I don’t want to be a media celebrity!
The video from CTV is here: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Video+Butterflies/3627770/story.html
I’m going back on Saturday, which will be a lot of fun. I’ll say it again though – your pictures are AWESOME!
Hope you were able to get in on Saturday. There was quite the line-up today so I photographed the bottle art instead and photographed the line-up 🙂 and then went over to take a few photographs of Hog’s Back.
Hog’s Back Falls on the Rideau River
Ron! Come back and see them again! Today I had an owl butterfly on my nose. That itches like mad. 😉
I had a Blue Morph land on my shoulder but nothing on my nose.
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